Chapter 13. Making Journal Entries

Intuit claims that you don’t need to know double-entry accounting (page 4) to use QuickBooks, And most of the time, that’s true. When you write checks, receive payments, and perform several other tasks in QuickBooks, the program unobtrusively handles the double-entry accounting for you. But every once in a while, QuickBooks transactions can’t help, and your only choice is moving money around directly between accounts.

In the accounting world, these direct manipulations are known as journal entries. For example, if you posted income to your only income account but have since decided that you need several income accounts to track the money you make, journal entries are the mechanism for transporting money from that original income account to the new ones.